From the Very Beginning ....to the Troubled Times to come Before the Deluge...

l

Sunday, 31 July 2016

What Happened to the New Age?

What Happened to the New Age?

Sorting Truth from Nonsense

By Richard Smoley

Not long ago I was walking through the aisles of a New Age
fair in the suburbs of Chicago. All the usual suspects were there: booths for
Baha’i and Eckankar; ladies selling essences and fragrances; bodyworkers
offering ten minutes of chair massage; psychics inspecting the etheric fields
of their subjects. Like most New Age events I have gone to over the past
decade, the fair had a tired quality to it.

I could simply be jaded. I’ve been going to such gatherings
for over thirty years now, and at this point they hardly impress me with their
novelty. But I may not be alone. One has the sense that for many, the energy
that gave rise to the New Age has ebbed.

Even the term “New Age” has come to sound stale, harking
back to the ’80s and the Harmonic Convergence, and, still further, to the
spirituality of the 1960s counterculture. Commercial interests have backed away
from the name, preferring the term “mind-body-spirit” or “MBS.” In January
2012, New Age Retailer, the primary trade magazine for this field in the US,
changed its name to Retailing Insight.

Was the New Age a fad? Was it a noble but misguided hope
that the world was ready for an enlightenment to which it now seems indifferent
or hostile? Probably neither. More likely this is the case: much of what the
New Age pioneered, including yoga, meditation, and organic foods, has become
mainstream. Thus you could say the New Age won out in many ways – but at the
cost of seeming fresh.

What about its ideas? Many of them too entered the
mainstream and have even become clichés. At this point it may be useful to step
back and look at some of the clichés of the New Age and see how well they stand
up.

The New Age

Let’s start with the phrase “New Age” itself. It goes back
far beyond the ’60s, even beyond the turn of the twentieth century. It first
started being used in 1864, when an American clergyman, Warren Felt Evans,
published a book entitled The New Age and Its Messenger.

Evans was propounding the ideas of the great Swedish
visionary Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). In the 1740s Swedenborg underwent a
series of spiritual awakenings that, he said, gave him access to the invisible
realms and to the hidden meanings of Scripture. One of his most remarkable
claims was that the Last Judgment of the Bible had no resemblance to the way it
was seen by conventional Christianity. It was never meant to mean Christ’s
second coming on earth. In fact it took place entirely in the world of spirits,
a realm which, in Swedenborg’s theology, occupies a middle place between heaven
and hell and serves as a clearinghouse for the newly deceased. This spirit
realm had accumulated a great deal of debris, such as base and mean entities, and
it needed a housecleaning. The Lord accomplished this in the year 1757.

This Last Judgment, according to Swedenborg, had no
immediate consequences for life on earth. Its only effect would be to weaken
the power of spiritual tyranny and oppression (notably on the part of the
Catholic Church, but also among the Protestants). New horizons on the spiritual
world would therefore open. This was the New Age that Evans proclaimed, and
Swedenborg was its messenger.

In his way Swedenborg was right. Many of the religious
shackles that seemed solid in the eighteenth century have been broken. There is
still a great deal of nonsense, deception, and crime in religion, but there is
also much more freedom of inquiry – even the freedom not to believe if you
don’t want to.

Since the nineteenth century, Swedenborg has faded into
comparative obscurity, and Evans, once a best-selling author, has been almost
completely forgotten. But the term “New Age” was given new life in the
twentieth century by figures such as the British esotericist Alice Bailey, and,
as we have seen, the New Age as an ideal reached its own peak in the late
twentieth century.

To go back to the initial question: how much truth is there
in this idea of a New Age?

In a trivial sense, every age is a new age. Today we face
unprecedented dangers and opportunities. So did our fathers; so did our
grandfathers. So will our children and grandchildren. Thus it has been since
the beginning of history.

But I don’t believe the human condition is going to change
in any radical way in the future. Whatever wonders and disasters we may
engender, we will still be born, love, experience pleasure and pain, and die as
humans have since the beginning of time. As Anton Chekhov said in his play
Three Sisters, written in 1900: “When we’re dead people will fly around in
balloons, there will be a new style in men’s jackets and a sixth sense may be
discovered and developed, but life itself won’t change, it will still be as
difficult and full of mystery and happiness as it is now.”

Paradigm Shift

This phrase is often connected to the idea of the New Age.
“Paradigm” means a scientific model. The Ptolemaic view of the solar system,
which put the earth at the centre, was one such paradigm. It was replaced by
another: the Copernican paradigm, which puts the sun at the centre.

How did the new view replace the old one? The historian of
science Thomas Kuhn asked this question in his influential book The Structure
of Scientific Revolutions. His answer goes something like this: A scientific
model inevitably has some flaws. It explains the data, but not quite perfectly.
There are anomalies. For a long time these are set aside and either explained
away or simply ignored. But after a certain point too many anomalies accumulate
and can no longer be set aside. Science must then find another model – another
paradigm.

In the case of astronomy, the Ptolemaic view explained the
movements of the planets quite well in light of the observations that could be
made at the time (up to the sixteenth century). This even included the
retrograde motion of the planets. If the planets moved around the earth, why
did they sometimes move backwards in the sky? The Ptolemaic theory replied by
positing epicycles – meaning that the planets not only revolved around the earth,
but moved in small cyclical orbits as they did.

Eventually the epicycle theory, which still did not match
the data entirely, began to break down. Astronomers responded by positing
epicycles within epicycles, but there was a point when this model seemed
implausible. Another one had to be found. The theory of Copernicus, modified by
Kepler, accounted for the planets’ motion much better. This was a scientific
revolution, also known as a paradigm shift.

The paradigm shift that the New Age speaks of is more vague.
To some degree it has to do with another scientific revolution – from Newtonian
to quantum physics. Newtonian physics is mechanistic and materialistic: it is a
universe of ricocheting billiard balls. The quantum universe is much stranger,
and some of its most brilliant theorists have stressed how bizarre and
counterintuitive it is. But one idea from quantum theory has captured the
public imagination: the observer affects the results of an experiment simply by
the process of observation. This theory seems to place consciousness, rather
than matter, at the centre of the universe.

This idea fascinates people who dislike the meaningless,
materialistic Newtonian universe. Some physicists, such as Amit Goswami, author
of The Visionary Window and other works, say quantum theory proves that
consciousness is the ground of all being. This is a step many other scientists
are not willing to take, largely because quantum theory talks about the
behaviour of submolecular particles; they are very reluctant to say quantum
effects occur on greater scales. Quantum physics is sometimes defined, in fact,
as “the science of the very small.”

What does this all amount to? There is certainly a new
scientific paradigm (although it is well to remember that much of quantum
theory was in place by 1930, making it nearly a hundred years old). But this
new paradigm, as understood and applied by physicists themselves, does not
prove consciousness is the ground of all existence. Nor is it leading toward a
more holistic and satisfying view of the universe. In fact the trend is going
in the opposite direction.

A generation ago there was much excitement, at least in the
popular mind, about the connections between quantum physics and mysticism. But
the majority of scientists, rightly or wrongly, have never bought it. They
remain firmly materialistic in their outlook.

Other disciplines have also moved backward. The psychology
of the ’60s and ’70s embraced humanistic and transpersonal perspectives, but to
all appearances this process has been turned around. Neuroscience has had so
much luck modifying behaviour through pharmaceuticals that now scientists seem to
assume more or less universally that consciousness is a mere side-effect of
brain states. (Never mind that this claim has never been proved or even
explained in any kind of coherent way.) Computer science, for its part, has
made such progress in simulating brain processes that some people now believe
it will soon be possible to download your consciousness into a computer,
allowing cognition to go on through the operation of a machine rather than a
brain. You will no longer need your body to be you. Minds are machines, whether
they are made of carbon-based protein or silicon.

In short, the paradigm that was so fondly expected to bring
about a new, satisfying, and holistic view of man’s place in the universe
failed to arrive. Conventional science, for all its accomplishments, is as
drearily materialistic as it was in the days of Queen Victoria.

That is not to say change will never come. Trends reverse
themselves without warning, and fashions in science come and go almost as
arbitrarily as the ones in couture. But that is how it looks now.

You Create Your Own Reality

In a trivial sense, this is certainly true. Your senses and
nerves and brain filter the data from the outside world (whatever this “outside
world” ultimately is) and create a picture of reality that enables you to
function.

But some New Agers go further. They say that all you have to
do is change your thinking and the world will change automatically.

To some degree this is true as well. Say you are having
money trouble. Try this mental experiment. Believe, as fully as you can, that a
cheque for a million dollars is coming to you next week. Suddenly your problems
will seem to vanish. You will have no worries.

Your thinking certainly changes the way you feel. But the
claim that you create your own reality is a little stronger than this. It is
saying that if you believe hard enough that this cheque will be coming, it will
come: the universe will manifest it for you. And this idea is harder to
swallow. At best, it can motivate you to strive to bring more money into your
life; at worst, it is nothing more than daydreaming.

Some people practice creative visualisation. By this method
you formulate a vivid mental picture, and you concentrate on it so that the
energy you are directing will make it appear in the physical world. This can
and sometimes does work. But it very often brings unwanted consequences in its
wake. You can visualise a cheque for a million dollars, and the cheque may
appear. But you didn’t count on the fact that you would get into a crippling
accident, and the cheque is to compensate you for the fact that you will never
walk again. Granted, this is an extreme example. Another more likely outcome is
that you will find that you really didn’t want what you were asking for and
were disappointed when you got it.

A few weeks ago, for no reason that I can discern, a file
suddenly opened up on my computer. It said, “Please, God, protect me from
everything I have been praying for.” I wrote it several years earlier and had
completely forgotten about it. Evidently I needed to hear it again.

Another thing is often overlooked: You are not the only one
creating your own reality. There are others like you. All of them have the same
power over reality that you do. And you are part of their reality as well.

This fact raises a large but unexamined question: if we
create our own reality, it must be a collective creation. And what is the
effect of all these minds creating and cocreating together? How do the thoughts
of your neighbours, your countrymen, your fellow humans as a whole, affect you?
How do the minds of many engender a collective reality?

This is, I believe, one of the most important questions
facing humanity today. There is a collective imagination – psychologist Charles
Tart called it “consensus trance” – that shapes our reality as much as, and
probably more than, our own private thoughts do.

As far as I can tell, psychology has not dealt with this
question or even acknowledged it. It is true that the psychiatrist C.G. Jung
spoke of the collective unconscious. He touched upon collective mentalities in
some of his articles, such as “Wotan,” which discussed the resurgence of an old
Germanic archetype in the Nazi ideology, and “The Complications of American
Psychology,” which related the American psyche to the nature of the land in
which it found itself. From another angle, the Russian psychologist V.M.
Bekhterev explored mass and mob behaviour in his book Collective Reflexology.
Bekhterev, who saw the Russian Revolution firsthand, had plenty of observations
to work from. Even so, the science of collective psychology is embryonic.

Thus up to a point it is true you create your own reality.
But so does everyone else, and you are part of that reality too. The question
for the twenty-first century is how we create our reality.

Be Here Now

Let’s turn to one of the most famous artefacts of the New
Age. A squarish, large-format paperback book, with a purple cover, its contents
printed on rough brown paper that looks like wrapping material. Its title: Be
Here Now. Its creator: the beloved American guru Richard Alpert, best known as
Ram Dass. The words, pasted down clumsily with letterpress as if to simulate
the visual distortions caused by LSD, urge you to awaken:

What are you doing?

Planning for the future?

Well

IT’s ALL RIGHT NOW

But later?… Forget it baby

That’s later

Now is

NOW

Are you going to

BE HERE or not?

IT’S AS SIMPLE AS THAT!…

If you get so efficient…

If you’ve got to turn off all the vibrations of the scene…

because you’re so busy

about the future

or the past

or time has caught you…

IT COSTS TOO MUCH!

No message from the New Age has burned itself into the
collective mind as deeply as this command: Be here now. The past is an
artificial construct. The future is an equally artificial construct. There is
only the present moment. There is always only the present moment. This is the
way to liberation.

The idea still reverberates. Just as its effect was starting
to fade, Eckhart Tolle came out with a booster shot: the best-selling Power of
Now, published in 2004.

No one could possibly refute this idea. It is always now,
and, it would seem, the atomic moments felt through meditative awareness – an
endless chain of nows, each one inexorably strung upon its predecessor – bring
us as close to ultimate reality as we are likely to come in this world.

As a mental discipline, what has sometimes been called “the
doctrine of the present” has no peer. Every moment – or, rather, every moment
you are aware of it – you bring your attention to the present; you sense your
feet on the floor and feel the breath go in and out. The welterings of your
mind subside. You are centred and at peace.

How could anyone question this?

In essence, I could not hope to. But in practice, another
view arises.

There is the sensation of my foot on the floor. This is
direct, immediate, real. There are, on the other hand, the thoughts and
fantasies and daydreams in my head, flowing before my mesmerised eyes like the
scenes of a thriller. By contrast, they seem unreal.

But maybe this is not the whole picture. Am I not, after
all, experiencing all these supposedly delusory thoughts in the present as
well? Why should one experience be held up as real and genuine, while the other
is despised as false?

Someone who goes to a few of the innumerable talks given by
Tibetan lamas in the West will sometimes hear them denigrate the conceptual
mind – the ‘monkey mind’ that must be suppressed, or even killed, if
enlightenment is to occur. But I once heard the Dalai Lama speak, and he
criticised this point of view. Although I don’t remember his exact words, I do
remember that he said this contempt for the conceptual mind was unjustified,
that this part of the mind too has its place, and one must not try to uproot or
kill it.

And sometimes this conceptual mind will take you out of the
present.

The present, then, that magic moment that discloses God, is
only one of innumerable types of experience. It is well, of course, to be able
to recognise and rest in it. But it may not be wise, and it certainly seems
impossible, to stay there all the time.

R.H. Blyth, in his celebrated collection of essays Zen and
Zen Classics, writes: “Where Buddhism makes its great mistake is in asking for
eternity without time. As Blake said, ‘Eternity is in love with the productions
of time’.”

Peace. If there is one word that encapsulates the New Age,
it is this one. In its day, it was more than a word. It was a gesture (the
fingers forming a V, the palm facing out in an exact reversal of Churchill’s ‘V
for victory’ gesture). It was an ideograph, the circle bisected vertically,
with two other lines extended down from the centre – a combination of two
letters in semaphore code standing for ND or “nuclear disarmament.”

But peace – a cliché? That is a harsh verdict. And if it is,
you will say, we need more of such clichés. And badly.

In the ’60s the peace movement was the result of a genuine
collective impulse. It was not only the recent memory of the horrors of the
Second World War. It was also an aftershock from the Cuban missile crisis of
1962, when the world came the closest it has ever come to nuclear war. In the
US, the peace movement was also a response to the Vietnam conflict and to the
real likelihood that, like the states in Orwell’s 1984, the superpowers would
maintain a permanent state of war.

Events turned out differently from the expectations, as
events always do. The threats to world peace that seemed so menacing during the
Cold War are gone, but they have been replaced by others, and when these are
gone, there will be others still.

Do we need a peace movement to turn ourselves around? I
think we do, but I also think we have never had a genuine peace movement. What
we have had are antiwar movements. And to be against war is not the same thing
as to be for peace.

Earlier in this article I talked about the possibility that
thoughts play a part – a major part – in shaping reality. And I think this is
the case. In this light what are we to make of today’s mentality, which
projects so much hatred toward its leaders? Do they deserve it? Maybe – but you
are not making them any better or their work any easier by directing hatred and
vituperation at them. Not if there is the dimmest bit of truth to the idea that
your thoughts create reality. And of course this goes double for any collective
feelings of hatred.

In this light I find myself thinking about the possibility
of a peace march – a genuine peace march. Such an event would be aimed not at
stopping the latest war but at offering peace and blessings to the leadership
of the nation, of any and all ideologies, without any agenda whatsoever. This
would be a real peace march, because it would be offering peace rather than
opposition, blessings rather than grievances. I wonder what effect it would
have.

A cliché, of course, could never become a cliché unless it
is widely disseminated. And it would never become widely disseminated if it did
not have much truth, and even wisdom, in it. So it is with the clichés of the
New Age. Many of them are rooted in ancient and indeed perennial truths. That
these truths need to be recast and restated in the language of a particular
time and place is hardly a flaw; it is a way of adapting them to the needs of a
generation. They will be restated and recast in many ways in the generations to
come.

about me

A new counter-culture is now spreading across the planet, a movement dedicated to protesting at the outlandish behaviour of the control freaks, with their surveillance, eavesdropping, secrecy and lies. Their greed and belligerent sabre rattling and their industries of war. The dream is to replace these sociopaths with Love!

I wish this blog to be a small part of this - We must be the change.

We will be set to task to rebuild our world and our planet from centuries of decimation and destruction brought on by the fallacy, the belief that we once tragically and collectively embraced thousands of years ago – the mistaken notion that we are separate from one another and everything else on the planet and in the universe. We will finally recognize that the truth is just the opposite – we are all one with everything on the planet and in the universe. We are spiritual beings, infinite consciousness simply having a human experience, and as soon we come to fully recognize and understand this, it will then finally be time for us to fly – to shine in all of our infinite, glorious possibility...